Cheney and the CIA

We all remember former Vice President Dick Cheney’s response to the 2012 Senate report on harsh interrogation techniques (a summary version of which was declassified in 2014): “The report is full of crap.”

But what we now know, thanks to the research of John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi [ht: ra], is that Cheney, then-deputy assistant to President Gerald Ford, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission on CIA domestic activities from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.

The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.

Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.

And, just to bring things up to the present, it was Bernie Sanders who, in October 1974, called the CIA “a dangerous institution that has got to go” and then, in October 2002, spoke in opposition to the Iraq War.